ESCAPE FROM SALINAS

by
Joel W. Hedgpeth

Edward Ricketts, 1937 photo

Edward Ricketts in 1937

compiled by
Robert "Roy" J. van de Hoek
December 21, 2000
Winter Solstice - at the lowest Low Tides & Highest High Tides
Malibu, California

ESCAPE FROM SALINAS
Page 9-10
by
Joel W. Hedgpeth
1975
in
Steinbeck and the Sea:
Proceedings of a Conference
held at the Marine Science Center Auditorium,
Newport, Oregon
May 4, 1974
Richard Astro,
Joel W. Hedgpeth, editors
OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
SEA GRANT PROGRAM
Publication no. ORESU-W-74-004

ESCAPE FROM SALINAS
Joel W. Hedgpeth
In the days of John Steinbeck's boyhood, Salinas was a farmer's town like dozens of others in California: the same Main Street, with the usual dry goods emporium, drug store, hardware and farm instrument store, pool-hall, saloon, newspaper andj job printing; and, on the unpaved side streets, the blacksmith shop, already on its way to becoming a garage, the lumber yard and feed and grain stores near the railroad station. In the summer, such towns were hot, dry, and somnolent. Salinas, however, was only a few miles from the sea, open to the cooling fogs with their smell of the sea. There were, of course, many hot and dusty days nevertheless, as it may have been when John rode his pony down the unpaved street near his home, but there was the the family cottage at Pacific Grove about twenty miles away. Like many other families in the middle of things, the Steinbecks escaped the summer doldrums of their own community by going to the seashore.

The cottage at Pacific Grove was only a few blocks from the sea, and in those days there was even less to interest a boy in that town than in Salinas; inevitably he walked along that shore, one of the world's most beautiful seacoasts. Many years later he wrote Joseph Henry Jackson, literary critic of the San Francisco Chronicle,"nothing gives me more pleasure than the little bugs on the rocks."

By that time, however, John Steinbeck, had taken a course in zoology at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, about half a mile from the family cottage on 11th Street, had become a friend of Edward F. Ricketts and with him had written Sea of Cortez. He often stopped by Hopkins Marine Station to chat with the professors there, especially the late Rolf Bolin, the well-known ichthyoloigist. He loved the ideas of biology and had a keen eye for interesting creatures on the rocks at low tide. Most of all, he admired biologists, "the tenors of society," and now and then wished he might have become one. He learned much from his friend Ed Ricketts, who thought John had the keenest eyes for collecting interesting specimens of anyone he had ever known. Steinbeck's interest in the sea and its scientific aspects continued until his final years; in 1962 he eagerly accepted the invitation of his friend Willard Bascom to witness and write about the first attempt to drill a hole into the bottom of the ocean.

The participants invited to represent Steinbeck's interest in the sea have had the common experience of residing at Pacific Grove; two of them, Arthur W. Martin and Fred H. Tarp, were students at Hopkins Marine Station in their graduate years, and Willard Bascom was an engineering student of beach processes from the University of California. Dr. Martin did his graduate time at Hopkins before Steinbeck or Ricketts became famous and did not know them, but his research interest in the sex life of the octopus would have delighted and fascinated Ed and John. Dr. Tarp, a student of Rolf Bolin, was in residence at Hopkins during those last hectic years when Ed had become famous as the Doc of Cannery Row. Willard Bascom, as the friend most closely associated with Steinbeck's interest in the sea in later years, brought to the symposium a fresh view of the eminent man of letters involved at the beginning of one of the significant scientific and engineering projects of our time.

The Mohole Project was one of the activities that aroused the public interest, especially in Congress, that led to the establishment of the national Sea Grant Program. Through his article about the project for Lifemagazine, John Steinbeck contributed in a significant way to this public interest. He certainly would have approved of the Sea Grant idea, and we hope, of this symposium in spite of his antipathy to the literary critics. From Ed Ricketts he learned to appreciate sound research, and he shared with Ed a disdain for the sterile, dehydrated approach of the cabinet naturalist who has no interesting ideas.

This symposium is a reminder that the Sea Grant Program has wider scope and purpose than teaching fishermen how to catch more fish or improve canning methods; for the implicit understanding of its broader purposes there could be no better spokeman than John Steinbeck, who saw the rise and fall of Cannery Row, learned the ways of seashore animals and participated in significant studies of the sea.
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